466 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



singular character for truthfulness and honesty/' * they are " won- 

 derfully honest/' f " honest and truthful in deed and word." % Ir- 

 respective of race, we find these traits in men who are, and have 

 long been, absolutely peaceful (the uniform antecedent) ; be they 

 the Jakuns of the South Malayan Peninsula, who "are never 

 known to steal anything, not even the most insignificant trifle/'* 

 or be it in the Hos of the Himalaya, among whom " a reflection 

 on a man's honesty or veracity may be sufficient to send him to 

 self-destruction." || So that in respect of conscience these uncivil- 

 ized people are superior to average Europeans, as average Euro- 

 peans are superior to the brutal savages previously described. 



Had Kant had these and kindred facts before him, his concep- 

 tion of the human mind, and consequently his ethical conception, 

 would scarcely have been what they were. Believing, as he did, 

 that one object of his awe — the stellar Universe — has been evolved, 

 he might by evidence like the foregoing have been led to suspect 

 that the other object of his awe — the human conscience — has been 

 evolved ; and has consequently a real nature unlike its apparent 

 nature. 



For the disciples of Kant living in our day, there can be made 

 no such defense as that which may be made for their master. On 

 all sides of them lie classes of facts of various kinds, which might 

 suffice to make them hesitate, if nothing more. Here are a few 

 such classes of facts. 



Though, unlike the uncultured who suppose everything to be 

 what it appears, chemists had, for many generations, known that 

 multitudinous substances which seem simple are really compound, 

 and often highly compound ; yet, until the time of Sir Humphry 

 Davy, even they had believed that certain substances which, be- 

 sides seeming simple resisted all their powers of decomposition, 

 were to be classed among the elements. Davy, however, by sub- 

 jecting the alkalies to a force not before applied, proved that they 

 are oxides of metals ; and, suspecting the like to be the case with 

 the earths, similarly proved the composite nature of these also. 

 Not only the common sense of the uncultured but the common 

 sense of the cultured was shown to be wrong. Wider knowledge 

 has, as usual, led to greater modesty ; and since Davy's day chem- 

 ists have felt less certain that the so-called elements are element- 

 ary. Contrariwise, increasing evidence of sundry kinds leads 



* Glasfind in " Selections from the Records of Government of India " (Foreign Depart- 

 ment), No. xxxix, p. 41. 



f Campbell in "Journal of the Ethnological Society," N. S., vol. i, 1869, p. 150. 

 X B. H. Hodgson in " Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal," xviii, p. 745. 



* Rev. P. J'avre in " Journal of the Indian Archipelago," ii, p. 266. 

 \ Col. E. T. Dalton. " Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal," p. 206. 



